An exploratory RFID patent analysis

Purpose – This paper aims to study the development of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology through an analysis of patents filed with and issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office. A close analysis of these clusters reveals the patent development strategies of two competing factions of RFID technology developers. This paper provides an analysis of the patents along with insights into the contents of the patents held by these two groups.Design/methodology/approach – The analysis is based on Intermec Technologies and the RFID Patent Pool, the two major players in this domain. The comparison of Intermec Technologies and RFID Patent Pool is conducted using meta‐data analysis and patent content clustering. The methodology and approach includes data pre‐processing, key phrase extraction using term frequency‐inverse document frequency, ontology construction, key phrase correlation measurement, patent technology clustering and patent document clustering. Clusters are derived using the K‐means approa...